Top Women in PR: Nicole Guillot

Nicole has been president and CEO of CNW Group since 2013, serving the PR, marketing and investor relations professions with content distribution, amplification and monitoring services. Nicole leads the development and implementation of the overall strategic plan for CNW. She oversees Canadian business strategy, operations, financial management, marketing and sales, with additional responsibility for inside sales across the U.S. In 2011, Nicole served as senior vice president, global products for PR Newswire. There, she implemented PR Newswire’s corporate strategic plan and drove the company’s product development functions worldwide. Before this, Nicole spent over 10 years in progressive leadership positions within CNW focusing primarily on product development, digital media and operations management.

Nicole led the initiative to revise a U.S. product and release it for CNW clients in Canada. The OMC, or Online Member Centre, is an online portal to use when uploading content for distribution. Designed to support the communications process, OMC offers a secure way to transmit news release and multimedia files. Its Media Studio feature tags and stores content for future use, reflecting the need for a repository of approved multimedia. The cross-channel, multimedia campaign included client communication via targeted, personalized emails to clients, internal communication and external promotion. The highlight of the OMC launch in Canada was the Content Centre multimedia news release built to showcase a video about the Media Studio feature. The campaign was supported with a nationally distributed news release, promotion on CNW’s blog and social promotion across CNW Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn channels. Adoption of the OMC portal has been steady, and well ahead of anticipated results. Client response has also been positive, all thanks to Nicole.